"Is it that time already?" Jamie wondered aloud. She took a sip of her cappuccino and reflected that she hadn't gotten nearly as much done this war as she'd hoped to. On the other hand, she'd been kidnapped, lured, whammied, taken flying, she'd spent several days believing that she was Tracy, not to mention the virtual backstage passes Chris had gotten her...
"Not bad for someone who barely wrote a half a kilobyte's worth of war fiction," said one of the other people sitting at the table, invisible to everyone but Jamie, who (as always) could see and hear them quite clearly.
"But I had such plans," Jamie sighed. "I mean, the whole Elmo thing... I never dealt with that..."
Her auditors were less than sympathetic. "You abandoned our story halfway through," pointed out another of the invisible people, "and in a rather awkward spot, at that."
"Yeah," seconded the first, "and what about that shower scene?"
"You wouldn't be getting that shower scene if it hadn't proven to be such a perfect Merc bribe," Jamie shot back, feeling singularly contentious. Normally, the people who came to visit the inside of her head were relatively quiet, polite, usually reasonable -- but these two were the most demanding visitors she'd ever known. "You just don't let up, do you?"
"We let you go to California," the woman reminded her.
"And we let you play in the war," the man spoke up. "It's not our fault that you spent most of your time busy or in pain."
"You are both the most $#@!ing annoying..." Jamie let her voice trail off, not finishing the sentiment; while it was true that the voices in her head could be a royal pain in the posterior sometimes, her life would have been far less fun without them.
"Oh, well," she said, to nobody in particular. "There's always next war..."
And for absolutely no reason, she began to laugh.
"Come on," she said, draining the last of her coffee and standing up. "We have work to do."
"You're finishing the story," said the woman.
"Among other things," Jamie told her cheerfully, limping happily down Yonge Street toward the Greyhound station.